Tuesday, March 27, 2012

My Raspberry Mistake

One summer I went to stay at my grandmother "Ducky's" house for the week. My aunt didn't live too far away so she and my cousin had come over to hang out for the day. Ducky's house was out in the woods in Connecticut. She had a huge beautiful garden with raspberry patch. One afternoon my cousin and I picked a bunch of raspberries and Ducky suggested we make ice cream with her homemade ice cream maker. The instructions said that the cooling cylinder had to be in the freezer for a couple of hours before using the ice cream machine, but I told her my parents kept it in the freezer overnight. She decided we should try it anyway....

After turning and turning (it was a hand crank ice cream maker) for what seemed like forever nothing had happened. So Ducky decided to make raspberry whipped cream in her kitchen-aid mixer. This did not go as planed either.

Raspberry seeds started shooting out of the mixer, flying around the kitchen. My cousin and I were rolling on the floor laughing. My aunt soon joined us.

In the end we had raspberry cream soup, and the kitchen was covered with raspberry seeds. They were even stuck in the speaker holes of Ducky's kitchen stereo. We called it "raspberry mistake" and anytime we had a kitchen mishap it was compared to raspberry mistake.

This is one of my favorite memories of Ducky. It taught me a great cooking lesson. Sometimes in the kitchen nothing goes as planned. You have to be prepared to improvise.

My intention was to make Sweet Potato, Apple, and Carrot Latkes. This was a "brilliant" idea I came up with while putting Bubba to bed one night. I began cooking at nap time at 11 am and ended up finishing during nap time at 3 pm, but don't worry--this recipe won't take you four hours to complete.

I started with:

3/8 cup flour

1/4 cup milk

2 eggs

1/2 large sweet potato

2 apples

1 carrot

1 teaspoon cinnamon

First I chopped the sweet potato, apple, and carrots

Then I added the flour, milk, and eggs

I tried to pan fry them and the tester broke apart. So I added 1 additional egg and 1/3 cup of flour.

Still no success. It just kept breaking apart.

So I called my mom. "I have a raspberry mistake!" I told her. She suggested baking them instead.

I scooped it into a mini muffin tin and baked at 350.

After 20 minutes or so it seemed that they would not solidify and I
would have a baked filling that I couldn't get out of the pan. I also still had half of the batter left. So I called in the big guns, my aunt. My aunt is a baking guru and owns Blackbird Baked Goods in Connecticut. "I have a raspberry mistake!", I told her. I described what I had done. The filling in the mini muffins could not have anything added--it would have to bake as is--and would probably end up like cobbler, but if I added some baking powder and more flour to the leftover batter maybe it could be salvaged.

It turns out the leftover batter could not be salvaged. It ended up very similar to a banana bread debacle I had just experienced the previous weekend. Leathery outside, gooey middle. Oh well I figured. Lets see how the mini muffins turn out.

I left the filling in for another 25 minutes till it started to get
golden brown on the edges.

It actually worked out!

Once they cooled the
apple juice that formed from the apples baking in the mix made almost a
caramelized glaze on the tops.

They were a little tough to get out of the pan, but Bubba doesn't care about ripped muffin bottoms. They tasted delicious!